The Air Force and Pentagon have also declined to explain whether U.S. nuclear weapons in storage in U.S. bunkers have been provided with the same alarm and motion-detection sensors that the National Nuclear Security Agency helped to install on the nukes being stored on Russian bases.
Clearly if such devices are standard on U.S. nukes, as several Air Force active and retired personnel have assured me is the case, then there is no way those weapons could have been removed from the Minot bunker by "mistake" as claimed the Air Force's official report on the incident.
The Pentagon has also refused to state whether the missiles were fueled up or not.
If they had not been fueled, methinks the Air Force would have said so to lessen the import of this incident. If they were fueled up then why, since they were ostensibly slated for destruction?
Finally, there is another big question that has not even been asked. Supposedly the reason the B-52 was flying to Barksdale with 12 missiles is that they are part of a total of 400 of these things, all of which have been declared obsolete and slated for destruction. But if all those Advanced Cruise Missiles are obsolete, then there is simply no reason for having any of them fitted with nuclear warheads. If they're obsolete, none of them would be on standby status. No one at Minot would ever be mounting a nuke on a cruise missile. Note that the Air Force is not claiming that the initial mounting of six warheads onto six missiles was a "mistake." Only that nobody in the subsequent chain of events was alerted to the fact that the warheads had been mounted. But why would warheads have been mounted on obsolete weapons in the first place?
Meanwhile, I have no knowledge as to the accuracy of this, but one Air Force vet tells me that the Advanced Cruise Missiles that were nuclear armed and mounted on a launch pylon on the B-52 in question would have been electronically linked to the plane automatically (which has the capability to program and reprogram the targeting of the missiles), and that therefore the pilot of the plane would have instantly seen on his instrument console that he had nukes on board that flight. He also told me the idea that the pilot would only have checked out the missiles mounted on one wing -- by chance the wing that had the six missiles with dummy warheads -- instead of both pylons and all 12 missiles as required, which is the claim of the Air Force report, is ludicrous. As he notes, pilots on these aging Stratofortresses see the pre-flight check as a life-or-death matter. Anything wrong on these planes can mean loss of the plane and even loss of the lives of the entire crew and of people on the ground. That would include the secure mounting of the missile cargo.
I find it ludicrous in the extreme that a BUFF pilot wouldn't know exactly what his aircraft had on board, unless he had orders that he was specifically not to know.
There is another question, raised by an Air Force vet, which also bears investigation. The Air Force is claiming the B-52 was supposedly ferrying 12 unarmed cruise missiles to Barksdale for disassembly. But a B-52, an antique aircraft that requires a big crew, demands enormous amounts of sevicing and repair and wastes a prodigious amount of fuel, is a terribly inefficient way to ferry these weapons to a graveyard. It would be infinitely cheaper to truck the missile bodies overland, or to stack and ship them in cargo planes, and in fact it simply defies belief that the Air Force would be doing this with Stratofortresses.
The more you look at this story, the more obvious it is that the Air Force claim that this was all just a big "mistake" has to be a blatant coverup of the truth.
It's obviously a coverup, but of exactly what we don't know,
One postulate is that Cheney ordered this through some of his and Rumsfeld's old neocon bros in the Air Force as a way of wavin' his weenie at Iran. Very possible.
Here's one of my own ideas. File this one under "Wild Tinfoil Hattery".
Perhaps a top brass Air Fundie wanted to use the nukes to provoke Armageddon and hasten the End Times?
A few years ago, that thought would never have crossed my mind, but given the rabid Extreme Evangelical bent of the AF lately, it's not so unbelievable any more. The Generals in charge of B-52s are possibly the old SAC Cold War/Seven Days In May/Dr. Strangelove crowd, dangerous if they've gone off the deep end. What do you think?
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